Smorgasbord of sagacious scribblings

Rudolf H. Smit tells me that The Self Does Not Die, the excellent study of near-death experiences that he co-authored with Titus Rivas and Anny Dirven, is now available in a Kindle edition. I reviewed the book here.

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A new TV show, The Good Place, presents a quasi-spiritualist view of the afterlife. We are told that a very small, select number of the departed go to a paradisal community of spacious homes, green gardens, and frozen yogurt shops, while the vast majority end up in the terrifying nether regions. The Good Place bears some resemblances to the Summerland of spiritualist tradition – spirits of equal evolutionary development are drawn together, thoughts and feelings directly influence reality, much of the environment apparently consists of thought-forms, and everything is an idealized recreation of earthly life. The show's gimmick is that the main character, Eleanor, doesn't really belong in The Good Place at all, having been a pretty crappy person in her physical incarnation.

At first, the idea that only a minuscule percentage of humanity gets to enjoy a decent afterlife, while nearly all of us end up in damnation, didn't sit too well with me. Nor does it satisfy Eleanor, who argues – plausibly enough – that since most people are neither saintly nor awful but of medium quality, there ought to be a medium quality afterlife for them. Someplace like Cincinnati, she suggests.

However, even by the third episode, it's becoming clear that the situation is more complicated than it originally appeared. In some respects, the show is a sitcom version of Lost, in which an initially straightforward premise is developed in unpredictable ways. My guess is that The Good Place will not turn out to be quite as good as were told, while the bad place won't be nearly as bad.

Anyway, it's a clever idea with an appealing cast. I think it could use more laugh-out-loud moments, and some of the humor falls flat, but it's worth a look.

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I recently read Laura Hillenbrand's best-selling book Unbroken, the story of World War II POW Louis Zamperini, whose bomber crashed in the Pacific, leaving him adrift on a life raft for over a month before he was captured by the Japanese and subjected to terrible abuse. Though his suffering was undoubtedly real, I suspect that Zamperini's story became considerably embellished over decades of retelling, especially after he rediscovered Christianity in a Billy Graham revival meeting and went on tour describing his experiences to eager crowds. Some of what he talks about just seems a little bit over the top.

For instance, he claims that the raft was strafed with machine gun fire from a Japanese bomber not once but five times – yet although the raft was peppered with bullets, neither he nor the other two men aboard received a scratch. He recounts epic battles with sharks that went on for hours, as the sharks became ever more crafty and aggressive, carrying out elaborate strategies to pluck the men from the raft. As a prisoner of war, he remembers having once been subjected to punishment in which he was punched in the face more than two hundred times in succession; I'm skeptical that anyone could live through that ordeal, much less recover without disfigurement or brain damage. My guess is that, as terrible as Louis's tribulations were, he felt the need to make his story even more dramatic each time he narrated it.

I mention this only to warn that his claims have to be taken with a grain of salt. That said, he does tell of an interesting experience aboard the raft, when he was so dehydrated and famished as to be on the verge of death. At this time, he says, he began to relive incidents from his life in astonishing detail, even incidents from his very early childhood that he had never previously recalled. One incident in particular involved his interaction with a dog when he was no more than two or three years old; he had never even remembered that dog before, since it had died when he was still a toddler. He witnessed this event from an impartial, third-person perspective, seeing himself as a small child and taking in every detail of his environment. Around the same time, he also had what would conventionally be called a hallucination in which, looking up at the sky, he saw ranks of angels and heard glorious, ethereal music. In general, the whole episode bears the hallmarks of a near-death experience – the life review, the encounter with the divine. Neither the author nor Louis makes this comparison, but it's obvious to anyone familiar with NDE literature.

In another life raft episode, while he and his one remaining companion lay languishing in the doldrums, Louis experienced an overpowering sense of the beauty and wonder of the physical world, which he saw suddenly as the handiwork of divine intelligence. Even the tormenting sharks now struck him as miraculous creatures of astonishing perfection. He felt no pain, hunger, or thirst, no desire to move, no unhappiness, just a complete sense of peace. Later, the memory of this event played a role in his religious conversion at the Billy Graham tent meeting. To me, his epiphany in the doldrums was strongly reminiscent of what Richard Maurice Bucke called an experience of "cosmic consciousness."

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In one of the comments threads, I mentioned that I was reading a book called An Atheist in Heaven, an account of apparent after-death communications on the part of Forrest J Ackerman, a well-known figure in the science fiction community. Some of these ADCs are pretty impressive, and the author, a long time friend of Ackerman named Paul Davids, went to the trouble of having some physical evidence subjected to elaborate scientific analysis. Unfortunately, I don't know if I'm going to finish the book, because the good evidence is outweighed by a mass of trivial coincidences. It appears that Davids decided his best course of action was to include everything – literally everything – that could possibly relate to the ADC phenomena, even down to the most minor and seemingly meaningless events. It's too bad, because there is a core of a very good book in here. This incidental material should have been either omitted or relegated to an addendum.

Still, for those who have a fond memory of Ackerman's magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, with its endless succession of terrible puns and cheesy horror movie photos, the book should provide a nostalgic smile. Amazingly enough, I even remember reading about an amateur movie contest sponsored by the magazine which the author entered; the title of his movie, Siegfried Saves Metropolis, had somehow stuck in my mind for more than forty years.

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Throughout the first half of 2016, I was under an unusual amount of stress, and when I look back now, I can see how it affected my thinking in unexpected ways. For one thing, my memory recall was way off. I had trouble remembering names, even very familiar ones – the names of classic movie stars, say. A name like Gary Cooper would elude me for hours. I found it difficult to concentrate. More than once I tried to read the Agatha Christie book Funerals Are Fatal, but I bogged down in the first four or five pages, finding it impossible to keep the characters straight as they were introduced. Even writing my own book, I would forget exactly what plot developments had already taken place or even the names of some of my characters!

My problems became so annoying that I tried to diagnose them. I'd read that Lyme disease can cause memory recall issues, and since I had a bull's-eye pattern on one leg that could be consistent with that illness, I decided to be tested for it. But the test came back negative. I wondered if maybe I was getting some kind of early onset dementia or if I was lacking some vital nutrient in my diet.

Eventually, however, the problem eased, and I can now see that stress itself was responsible. In fact, just recently I tried reading Funerals Are Fatal again, and though I still found the opening scene a little too exposition-heavy, I had no difficulty with it.

The episode reminded me of something I read in one of the Seth books by channeler Jane Roberts. I don't remember the exact source, but somewhere Seth says that conscious awareness varies much more from day to day and even from hour to hour than most people realize. To drive the point home, he temporarily adjusts the level of consciousness in Jane's husband, who reports feeling progressively foggier and more confused. This always struck me as an interesting idea. My guess is that we tend to remember the parts of the day when we are most alert, while forgetting other parts of the day when we are in more of a daze. I think it's likely that we spend much more of our daily activities on autopilot than we realize.

In any case, my experience drove home the close connection between mind and body. No, it doesn't follow that mind is reducible to an emergent phenomenon of physical processes, but it does suggest that there is continuing feedback between mental states and physical states, and that what we call "mind" is both more complex and more fragile than we ordinarily assume.

Comments

Interesting observations Michael, especially on The Good Place. I heard about the show, but the more I read about it, the more it sounds like a cosmic horror story rather than a comedy. If Florance Nightengale can't get into Heaven, what chance do ordinary people have? In fact, I think the show brings up a puzzling quandary authors have when writing stories about the afterlife: How do you include conflict without making Heaven and its residents look like legalistic elitists obsessed with control and obedience? It's a fine line to tred, and it remains to be seen if the show can get away from it.

With regards to Mr. Zamperini's story, I agree that there's no doubt he underwent horrible situations, but it is possible they were exagurated in the hopes of converting other people to the faith. Still, by all accounts it seems that Zamperini's faith did help him greatly in life, and that's always a plus.

Your last point about stress and consciousness also hits really close to home: After seeing a lot of mystery shows with my family and seeing how people in them can effortlessly recall what they were doing a week before, I realized that I often have difficulty remembering what I did just three days ago, let alone what I ate, where I was at a certain time, etc. Perhaps our consciousness is in a sort of auto-pilot mode for everyday activities, and only lights up when we're doing something intellectually stimulating or out of the ordinary. Still, it's great that you feel better after all all you went through.

Here's a NDE from the IANDS site. I tend to think like her, the universe is the same where ever you are. Its consciousness that determines your interpretation and experience. If it's all consciousness at it base, and you become a quantum aspect of consciousness, you can connect to each and every person and experience that ever was and know all of mankind, now, in the past and the future. As all of time is there and here, it doesn't pass. Also as one man said, I could be a tree, not only a tree, but a cell in that tree.

"Heaven' as we call it, is probably all around, "as people say, I was everywhere".

I also think you denote the afterlife experience, simply by your own development level. All the trappings, "summerland" are therefore what some people denote as necessary.

I do think NDE'S are also tailoured to give a certain message. Just my thoughts.

On the Ackermann book.. I was hoping for an in to tell the most complete and persuasive of three (seemingly) distinct sagas of synchronicity suggestive of communication from the deceased, very much in line with the material in that book. My story involved a dead friend, and I collated the details and submitted them to the SPR last year...however its far too long to post in the comments section here and also benefits from the inclusion of photographs, so I shall have to leave it.

Instead, if I may, I'll briefly speed through the third, most recent, of the sagas which began with the death of my brother in May of this year, and is book themed, in keeping with the subject of this blog.

My brother passed away in a hospice on the 15th of May around 2am. He had been living in my house in the last few months of his life. On the afternoon of the same day I was wandering into his room while speaking on the phone to our sister. He always left things in a mess and I was casually picking up official letters and the like from his cluttered sideboard and occasionally putting them on the bed to read out as I continued talking ,before putting them back. As I did so I began to focus on wondering where the book now lying on the middle of the bed had come from...

The book itself wasn't a mystery.. I'd given it to my brother when he was in hospital. No the mystery was that it categorically wasn't there moments before and I had no conscious recollection of finding it or placing it there. In fact I'd earlier wondered what had ever happened to it. The subject of the book was death bed visions and the title staring up at me on this, the day of his death, was "One Last Hug Before I Go"......

Oddly, perhaps perversely, I was already and simultaneously rationalizing it away. Perhaps it had been under the papers I'd picked up and, conscious mind engaged in conversation, I'd inattentively tossed it to one side on the bed, leaving no trace of it in my memory. (I figure this is possible, despite no evidence for it, as I often find myself bringing milk to a teacup only to find it already has some...and therefore must have done it already on automatic pilot. ) But whatever the mechanism, the aptness was more than striking. I subsequently messaged the author of the book on Facebook to tell her about the incident. A fact to which we'll return...

3rd July. I'd cleared out the brother's room, adjacent to my own, ready for redecoration. A few nights earlier on the Thursday night/Friday Morning, I'd had a false awakening dream. By that I mean I appeared and felt myself to be awake, in bed in the surroundings I was genuinely in, but concluded these moments were in fact a dream when I subsequently woke up. But in this fake awakening I first heard my brother leave the room next door, announce he was going downstairs and say something about something being haunted. I then had a (not for the first time over the years) sense of being attacked by an invisible something before,as I say, I woke up and realised the preceding events could not have happened. Whether this incident is relevant you must decide, but on the Saturday night I was on Amazon looking for small items of furnishing to complete the room. Sunday morning, the third, I woke with an idea of what I wanted....

I switch on the computer, open up Amazon and after a few moments find myself staring, perplexed. What I'm looking at is a fairly blank amazon page with the search box, set to kindle (I didn't have one) and with the name Joni Mayhan typed in. I had not typed those words, heard of that name, been looking at any books the night before. I later tested if there was an autofill fuction..there wasn't. And the author and her books did not appear in my "based on your previous purchases" suggestions, which I later searched. In short I couldn't work out why I'm staring at that name in a book search box. I might have dismissed it but out of curiosity or to jog my memory I pressed the search button....

Ms Mayhan turns out to be the author of a large number of "true life paranormal" books..two titles stared out at me dramatically. "Signs of Spirit: When Loved Ones Visit" and "Ghostly defenses".....

Something else startling happened the same day, but as it ties in with one of hte other sagas it would only confuse you so I must skip over it. After a week or two I sent of for the Signs of Spirit book.

There was, disappointingly for our narrative, nothing profound or personally meaningful in its contents. But it did direct my attention to the point that purported signs of a dead loved one are things apt and suggestive of them personally. It made me realise the two significant incidents since my brother's death had been book related..and he was an out and out bibliophile. I noted this fact on another website, and within an hour a third book themed "coincidence" occurred....

A friend had lost his birth mother the week before (he was adopted but had got to know her in adulthood) and I wrote to ask how he was. He reported he was to be a pallbearer and read a poem at the service but hadn't found one yet. Unsolicited I left the conversation to see if I could find a passage I might suggest to him. After a couple of abortive thoughts I decided Gibran;s the Prophet (which, despite its fame, I'd never heard of till given a copy by...yes..my brother) may be the appropriate source. I dug out my copy, found a passage and suggested it to my friend. "How Strange!" he replies..for the last few weeks he'd been carrying around a book his mother had signed a dedication to him in when they first met. He sent me a picture. She'd written "To Mark (April 1990),On our first meeting. May there be many more. This book has given me much over the years. I hope it may do so for you."

I'm sure you've guessed. The book was Gibran's The Prophet.

And here's where the story comes full circle....September 6th, the author of "One Last Hug Before I Go" finally replies to me..she says somethings wrong with her phone, she's only just received my message and others dating back months. In her reply - unsolicited and in complete ignorance of all of the above - she includes an anecdote of her own. "My mother was very very sick and we knew that she was going to be passing soon. Her best friend went to the bookstore try to find something to comfort her. All of a sudden a book dropped off the shelf. The title of the book was the Prophet. At that time this book was incredibly popular. It provided peace for those who are preparing to make the journey to the other side. "

\\"If it's all consciousness at it base, and you become a quantum aspect of consciousness, you can connect to each and every person and experience that ever was and know all of mankind, now, in the past and the future." - Lynn//
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Exactly. Excerpt from Randy Gehling's NDE (age 10), ""That was really cool! I kind of felt as though my body exploded - in a nice way - and became a million different atoms - and each single atom could think its own thoughts and have its own feelings. All at once I seemed to feel like I was a boy, a girl, a dog, a cat, a fish. Then I felt like I was an old man, an old woman - and then a little tiny baby."

\\"To me, his epiphany in the doldrums was strongly reminiscent of what Richard Maurice Bucke called an experience of "cosmic consciousness." - Michael Prescott//
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That has happened to me a couple of times. Both times I had an overwhelming sense of euphoria and a very strong feeling that everything was right with with the world. That everything was happening exactly the way it was planned out. Everything is going to be okay. I'm not sure what caused either one of these episodes. I am overweight and don't take good care of myself?

But the euphoria is awesome when it happens. I was outside both times, one time sitting on a swing in Florida and the other time I was driving home from work. I just got this sense that everything is okay and that there was no need to worry.

"But the euphoria is awesome when it happens. I was outside both times, one time sitting on a swing in Florida and the other time I was driving home from work. I just got this sense that everything is okay and that there was no need to worry."

My mind must be somewhat fried as well (it's one of those weeks). I first read the title of this post as a "smorgasbord of salacious scribblings.". No offense, I just chuckled to myself.

I wouldn't be surprised by sharks experimenting with strategies. We're constantly admonished not to humanise animals, yet research continues to accumulate that animals aren't as dimwitted as we like to believe. I was watching a fascinating special about sophisticated spatial reasoning abilities in spiders of the genus Portia.

I think even the need to develop more higher quality evidence on the existence of an afterlife, and not to discuss the situation of the inhabitants of the afterlife. Synchronicities are weird, but it is all, what happens with the recent scientific research? I do not see address this issue in the media.

Possibly, but I think if you were to read the book you'd see what I mean by some of the stories being over the top. For instance, Louis says he had to enter the water at one point, and a shark attacked him. He repelled it by hitting it on the nose. Okay. But then it attacked again and again and again and again ... and every time he repelled it with a punch in the nose. After a while you have to wonder how many times this actually happened, or if it happened at all.

In another doubtful story, he claims he ran a 4:12 mile in the Army ... while wearing combat boots and running on sand. The world record at the time was only a few seconds shorter. Yes, he had been an Olympic runner several years earlier (though he didn't medal), but this claim sounds a little too good to be true. I'm sure the guy went through hell, but I think he also had the gift of blarney.

"I think even the need to develop more higher quality evidence on the existence of an afterlife, and not to discuss the situation of the inhabitants of the afterlife."

Yes, Juan, you've made this point repeatedly, but I'm afraid I've already devoted thousands of hours to writing hundreds of posts covering the evidence. I don't think anyone who's unpersuaded would change his or her mind because of another hundred posts, even if I had the stamina to write them. There are many websites that do focus on scientific evidence in this area, though.

@Matt Rouge - I need little encouragement. :) However the principle story to which I alluded is, as I say, too long to do justice to in any truncated form. I can however probably speed through the third (or more accurately, first) tale. It's the most mysterious as it is still ongoing, seems to weave in and out of the other stories, and - if we speculate dead authors behind such events - the identity of the culprit gets more and more obscure.

I've told the first few chapters on here before I think, but let's speed through them:

1) 2003. My dad (Gerry, short for Gerard) had been dead 18 months. My mum, who is wheelchair bound, became incredibly distressed when she realised the small cross had vanished from the chain around her neck, as apparently he had given it to her. As her mobility is limited so too were the number of places it could have fallen. I searched everywhere including -on my hands and knees - the small plain bare space of floor in her downstairs bedroom. No sign of it. While she went into the bathroom to search her own clothing I stood in the doorway of her bedroom, and in an embarrassed whisper tried - in accordance with a correspondence I'd seen on the subject in the Fortean Times magazine - asking "them" for the return of the cross. (Them being the unnamed fairies/spirits/djinn/borrowers or what have you). Shortly afterwards I walked back into the room and there right, slap, bang in the middle of the floor in plain sight was the cross. I cannot here convey the impossibility of this. It was a full blown magic trick.

2012. My mother now has dementia, and due to -at the time - ongoing UTIs had been in the habit of sudden bouts of confusion as well as casual references to dead relatives (namely her mother and my dad) On a particular Monday in December three things happened.a) She spoke of my dad having been standing in the door of her bedroom, saying nothing. b) a book I'd sent for arrived in the post. It was about the idea synchronicities were communication from the dead. In the first few pages was an anecdote about a woman in the US who's house had a presence..a pen her late mother had given her had vanished, she gets distraught, searches everywhere including the bedroom, angrily demands it return from "them", goes back into the bedroom, and there it is plain as day in the middle of the bed. Here's where my jaw drops..the woman's name is Geri Gerrard, and it emphasises it was a "Cross" pen. And this in a book about synchronicity being communication from the dead. c)My mum, in bed and knowing nothng of this becomes agitated, demanding the "tin box". The only one I can think of is in her bedside drawer and contains nothing but old medicine packets etc. She ought to have no recollection of its existence, but we get it out to placate her. She goes searching through it and, with a "see!" expression retrieves and holds aloft the long forgotten chain and cross.......

At this point, and if the story had ended here, you would think the invisible author was obvious, and we'd skip over the delicate detail that Geri Gerrard's experience had happened while my father was still alive. Unfortunately for clarity the story did not - and has not - ended.

2015. I read on here that the Exorcist author William Peter Blatty has published a book about his conviction his late son is showing signs of his continued survival. I go searching online for a review which will detail some of these signs. I find a review which recounts two in detail. The first of which involves...deep breath...a medal on a chain around Blatty's neck, a medal which had belonged to his late son,it vanishes, he's distraught, search the only possible location over and over on hands and knees, no sign, utters allowed that the son will bring it back, soon after finds it plain as day in the endlessly searched location. The medal, as described in the book bears the image of three crosses. In the review however its erroneously referred to throughout as a "miraculous medal" which is something specific..a catholic talisman bearing the image of the Virgin Mary. This sounded familiar...I dug out "our" chain and cross and confirmed it also carries a second object. A miraculous medal.

So now who is the author? My father - who was alive when Geri Gerrard had her incident? Or Peter Blatty - who was alive when we had ours? And how are the two connected in any way? It ceases to be so simple, doesn't it? Figuring perhaps all of this was for the benefit of Blatty senior rather than me I tried repeatedly to find a way to contact him, but failed, so so much for that idea.

June 2016. A letter in the Fortean Times. A woman in Puerto Rico. Bedtime visitation from recently deceased sister, next morning a compulsion to retrieve her own..."Mary Medal" (googling suggests this is again the Miraculous Medal), which se thinks is in her safe deposit box (Tin box?!), but can't find key or afford replacement, gets distressed...well you can fill in the rest of that yourself. You get the idea.

Finally (well not really, but even I have lost the will to go on), I mentioned in the earlier book themed saga that "something else" happened later on the day Joni Mayhan's name was filled in on Amazon for me. It was this: that evening the carers who tend my mother had left, I went into her room, and there were two things visibly lying under her bed. A leaflet from a magazine and...a small bracelet of wooden prayer beads. I cannot swear I'd seen them before but have convinced myself I have and had been in the bedside drawer. Either way I'd never picked it up and looked at it before, because to my ..well at this point I'm too accustomed to this stuff to say astonishment..the bracelet had two tiny objects upon it. A cross and a holy medal..... The medal in this case, and it took some squinting to work out, was an image of St Anthony. Who is he? Why he is, of course, the traditional catholic identity of the supernatural benefactor who returns upon request missing objects.

I can only add to all of this that neither myself nor any of the deceased people of my acquaintance are or were particularly religious, and that the repetition of crosses, holy medals, and should I perhaps add the book title the Prophet ?..makes an obvious culprit or purpose, if either exist, harder and harder to identify.

\\"but I'm afraid I've already devoted thousands of hours to writing hundreds of posts covering the evidence. I don't think anyone who's unpersuaded would change his or her mind because of another hundred posts, even if I had the stamina to write them." - Michael Prescott//
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I know I've said this before but there is something about death bed visions that just strikes me as being true. When I read those stories of dying people seeing their deceased relatives I can't for the life of me believe they are all made up. I find them very believable. That just isn't the way evolution and Darwinian selection work.

Evolution isn't concerned with whether you are comforted when you die. It only cares about getting DNA into the next generation and how fit your genes are. Evolutionary fitness is a measure of how good your genes are at making you survive and reproduce not how happy or comfortable you are. And when you are in the process of dying and see your dead relatives there is no way that would increase your fitness.

So when I read these amazing stories about people close to death, and there are so many of them, it says to me that something miraculous is going on here. Something beyond biology and evolution. Something deep and mysterious.

There are some really good and amazing books out there about death bed visions. Books like "Final Gifts" by Maggie Callanan, "Visions, Trips and Crowded Rooms" by David Kessler, and the Irish book "Going Home" by Colm Keane. I highly recommend all three books.

Seriously, something amazing happens when people get close to death and I find it very comforting and uplifting. They sound like a gift that God would give us as we are crossing over, something believable that the creator of the Universe might share with us to help us on our journey to the other side. I'll be honest, I love them and am thankful for them because they have changed my life. I find death bed visions to be just as evidential as NDEs, and maybe more so.

Last night on the late-night radio talk show Coast to Coast AM I heard interviewee Linda Moulton Howe say something of interest about the book The Holographic Universe. She said that Budd Hopkins told her many years ago that its author, Michael Talbot, was a member of his UFO-abduction experiencers group, and that Talbot told him that the books contents were given to him by the abductors, whom he referred to as EBans (not grays). (Short for extraterrestrial biological entities.)

Michael Vann,
Charles Darwin in his book "Descent of Man" published around 1871 wrote several pages giving examples of his and other scientist's observations of behaviors of various animals which Darwin thought revealed evolving emotions and thought processes in animals, including birds and insects, similar to those displayed by humans. I have to say after having had the good fortune to live closely with several intelligent dogs and having been a close observer of bird behavior that I also think that there probably is not a lot of difference between humans and many animals in the way they experience this reality and how they interpret and react to it and maybe even think about it

When I was in college zoology classes, it was anathema to "anthropomorphize" animal behaviors but the farther I get from college the more I realize that my college professors were probably wrong. My belief now is that all animals, including humans, have a conscious spirit that through it's experience in life grows toward God. I might even say that while I don't think that humans are reincarnated as animals (unless they choose to take a vacation from human miseries) I do think it may be a possibility that the lower forms of spirit consciousness may reincarnate in higher animal forms, eventually including humans.

I know, I know---that's transmigration of souls which, though part of some eastern religious beliefs, is not a belief system of many western religions and any westerner who espouses transmigration of souls would be looked on as not being very intelligent. - AOD

I think the idea of animals as robots was a very materialist tactic trying to push the debunked nonsense of behaviorism.

The New Atheist Dennet, who actually is an intellectual descendant of the behaviorist academics, tried to go from lobsters being mere robots up to humans - yet as noted by Graeber lobsters have been shown to engage in the fun of play:

The first and second definitions of the noun ‘mind’ in the dictionary include the following: “The human consciousness that originates in the brain. . . “ and definition number two, “The totality of conscious and unconscious processes of the brain and central nervous system. . . .”

So there you have it!

According to a consensus of great English intellects whose authority qualifies them to define word meaning for the rest of us, consciousness must be an emergent phenomenon of physical processes; that is, consciousness as mind must be an epiphenomenon of the brain.

That definition of mind is so ingrained into the our group-think that no amount of evidence that suggests that maybe mind and consciousness are two separate things---mind, being dependent upon a functioning brain and consciousness maybe not dependent upon a functioning brain---will convince mainstream academic materialists or the unthinking general public.

Without a doubt there is continuous feedback between the ‘mind’ and the rest of the body. Mind is what can at times voluntarily control bodily functions including urination and defecation, erectile tumescence, peristalsis and salivation, cardiac output, breathing, perspiration, muscle contraction and relaxation, among other physiological effects. Mind is what learns language, learns skills; a mind is what thinks. It is the voice speaking English in my head.

But that voice is not me. I am something else. I am a consciousness; a consciousness that hears that voice in my head; a consciousness that has been incarnated in a body with a brain and a developing mind.

Then there is the matter of the “subconscious” mind or “subliminal” mind as Frederic Myers called it. Is the subliminal “mind” our true spirit consciousness? Is that who we really are? Is that the so-called spirit that survives dissolution of the physical body? Perhaps the subliminal consciousness incorporates all that the supra-consciousness has learned in a given lifetime and is thereby enlightened? Does the subliminal consciousness contain all of the experiences of lifetime after lifetime? And, in some people does some of that stored subliminal information bleed into a current lifetime as past life memories?--- Does it produce a prodigy?--- A savant?--- A dissociated personality?

Consciousness experiences what the mind brings to it through the filter of the brain But some form of consciousness---perhaps the subconscious, may exist without mind. Some people who clinically have a non-functioning brain have reported conscious experiences. An infant is conscious---has consciousness--- but, for all intents and purposes does not have a functioning mind ---not for a while anyway. His mind is yet to emerge from his developing brain and perhaps his subliminal consciousness directs the whole process according to some predetermined plan for that lifetime. - AOD

Wanting a second opinion on an argument seen on Youtube which I think is stupid; someone arguing with one breath that God cannot exist because there is suffering in the world, and with the next that it would not be possible to have an enjoyable afterlife without the existence of suffering. So which is it?

That too is a fascinating story! I remembered reading about it here before.

One thought: Does there have to be a particular "author" involved? Could it not be the field of consciousness as a whole at work?

With events such as these, I find it hard to imagine that a person Over There is saying, "Let's set up this elaborate proof!" and is managing the placement of objects, etc. I mean, we don't have those skills Over Here, do we?

It's not unthinkable that we gain new skills Over There (indeed, I'm certain we do), but the skill to engineer events in this way seems specifically to transcend the strong points of human mentality. Rather, to me at least, it makes more sense of thinking that such events come about due to a kind of "spiritual charge" on the earthly system, to which the person Over There feels s/he may accede or not. For example, the event may come to the person in a kind of vision, and s/he may then will it to be so or not. Or perhaps the vision and willing are one thing. As opposed to the person having to "think up" how to do it. Further, more than one person Over There may simultaneously be involved in the vision.

\\"someone arguing with one breath that God cannot exist because there is suffering in the world," - chel//
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Suffering exists to teach the soul the stuff it came here to learn. This Earth life is a school, albeit a holographic hoax or illusion, and the suffering that we experience, separation, pain, scratching, itching, burning, etc. imprints on the soul the parameters of the body.

The same reason religious zealots in the middle ages flagellated themselves and middle class girls that live in sterile suburban homes with no bugs to bite them take knives and intentionally cut themselves on purpose. Those "bits of information", i.e. pain, teach the soul what "out there" look and feel like. It imprints on the soul the shape of the body they inhabit. What "out there" is.

Remember they come from a place where time and space do not exist so they come here to learn what it is like to be inside and limited by a body and what it means and how it feels to be in a body.

And in case someone asks "yeah but why do we need to learn that?" Because the alternative is to be nothing and feel nothing. Pure consciousness with no concept of feeling or knowing anything. Like a newborn baby that doesn't even know where it ends and its mother begins. That is why we come here.

To learn all that because if we never came here we wouldn't know what it felt like to be embodied, what pleasure felt like, or what it felt like to make love, eat food, taste, smell, touch, time and space, etc. We learn all that here and then use it on the other side to create or conjure up a reality on the other side.

We come here to become ourselves. To get an identity, to develop a sense of self, separateness, embodiment, dimensions, time, etc. If you are pure consciousness the only way you can know anything is by experiencing it. Sort of like riding a bike or driving a car. You got to get in the car, behind the wheel, or on the bicycle and ride that thing. Otherwise you are like a wisp of that cloud overhead, only occupying the entire universe, and you don't know jack squat.

And by the way tattoos, piercings, sticking metal bars through your skin (Malaysian religious zealots), or leather thongs hanging you up in the desert (American Indians), or sticking your hand in a bag of bullet ants (South American Indians) is all the same thing as cutters, or medieval zealots flagellating themselves. It's just the soul telling you to do that stuff so it can learn what the body looks and feels like, what "out there" is shaped like. The limits of the body.

That is why pain exists. The soul doesn't care how it gets the information, it just wants it, lots and lots of it. Positive or negative, with emotion because emotion and memory are linked. And separation teaches the soul what it means and how it feels to be separate which is something else it can't learn in heaven due to those overwhelming feelings of oneness and connectedness in heaven.

It's like a big puzzle and you got to put all the pieces together. Stand back and see the big picture.

Excerpt from Michelle M's NDE, "I felt an understanding about life, what it was, is. As if it was a dream in itself. It's so very hard to explain this part. I'll try, but my words limit the fullness of it. I don't have the words here, but I understood that it really didn't matter what happened in the life experience, I knew/understood that it was intense, brief, but when we were in it, it seemed like forever. I understood that whatever happened in life, I was really ok, and so were the others here."http://www.nderf.org/NDERF/NDE_Experiences/michelle_m%27s_nde.htm

"I don't think anyone who's unpersuaded would change his or her mind because of another hundred posts, even if I had the stamina to write them. There are many websites that do focus on scientific evidence in this area, though."

But what about new cases and evidence on the existence of an afterlife? This post can give the impression of stagnation, suggesting that there is nothing really worth investigating. Synchronicities are very weak in particular, as can be attributed to chance and our common sense is not prepared to assess the probabilities of these events.

Matt Rouge: "One thought: Does there have to be a particular "author" involved? Could it not be the field of consciousness as a whole at work?

With events such as these, I find it hard to imagine that a person Over There is saying, "Let's set up this elaborate proof!" and is managing the placement of objects, etc. I mean, we don't have those skills Over Here, do we? "

Believe me the implausibility of a dead individual intricately manipulating events has occurred to me. When it comes to meaningful coincidences (as opposed to objects disappearing and reappearing) every incident has it own back story, triggered by events in the lives of unrelated living persons, stretching back through time. And if we were to imagine..as initially seemed "obvious" ...that my own late father had been behind the earlier story in which a woman of the same name had an incident matching the one in my home years later - happening in fact before he even died! - and that he organised all the subsequent events which lead to that story being told and printed in that particular book arriving on that particular day etc etc...well if we imagined that, we'd be elevating him from a ghost to a god.

And yet, in all these stories an author there appears to be. By which I mean an intent, or a trigger of some kind. I personally came to one of two conclusions. One has been referred to in a different context in the other conversation going on in this thread. The idea that waking reality is a dream..quite literally. Dreams are malleable. And that imagining it to be so all paranormal experiences can be explained. In the case of after death communication and purposeful coincidence what I envisage is that our "real" sleeping self is having suggestions whispered into our ear by those - perhaps deceased loved ones - who are already awake, and just like in our regular night time dreams, such whisperings may reshape the plot of the dream around us.

Alternatively I also play with the idea that "Synchronicity", the drawing together of meaningfully themed experiences, is a genuine physical quality of the universe and that - if the dead do live on - they can perhaps stir the sea of coincidence around us; that is, not setting up the individual incident but causing general un-predetermined stuff suggestive of their presence to happen around us.

One thing which has drawn me back to this latter personal theory is that last year I had a startling sequence of events repeatedly bringing to my attention the name and thought of a particular estranged friend. Multiplying synchronicities which, had he been dead, I would have instinctively interpreted as his ghost getting my attention! But he wasn't and isn't and we're now friends again. Here's the thing..when I re-engaged with him I got to ask him if anything negative had been happening in his life around September or October of last year (when these incidents occurred). At first he could think of none but then, as an afterthought recalled, oh that wold be around the time I had alopecia..chunks of hair were falling out. It was stress related.

Now this could of course be coincidence. But supposing it wasn't I can envisage a mechanism..that having formerly been "entangled" by our close friendship,when he's in stress an unconscious part of his mind sends out a distress signal which reaches me by attracting physical coincidences suggestive of him into my day. If we can imagine such a thing, then its no leap to imagine the unencumbered mind of the deceased doing the same thing with deliberate intent. They think on us in a particular way and...stuff happens. Not directed, not intricately plotted, perhaps not even specifically chosen, but just..stuff which screams out their name.

All, again, speculation.

None of it though answers the question..why the cross and medal stuff? Of whom is that suggestive? Increasingly no one specific..well apart from religious entities themselves but I'm clearly reluctant to go there. The impression I'm getting with that particular saga is that those incidents seem to serve - and perhaps not just for me - as a kind of calling card when the door to other, unrelated, strange stuff with a more easily identified author is about to happen or has just happened. But for now its a vague and ill shapen notion.

But then we have the much alluded to third saga..and that seems different. Because it had a clearly defined beginning and an end (?) and culminated with a seeming direct and "signed" message in plain English from the deceased suspect!

In my opinion synchronicities are the worst kind of phenomena about postmortem interactions because they are weaker than NDEs, apparitions and mediumship and they all are statistically possible by chance.

@ Juan "In my opinion synchronicities are the worst kind of phenomena about postmortem interactions because they are weaker than NDEs, apparitions and mediumship and they all are statistically possible by chance."

I'm not sure who would argue that synchronicities have any value to "Science" (the method or the imagined body) at all. I'm not sure they need or are meant to be of scientific relevance. They are,almost by definition, personally meaningful to the experiencer, and in as much as there is any scientific interest in them its on the subject of cause and effect only, not in weighing them up as obvious evidence of an afterlife.

But you suggest a cause...that they are "all statistically possible by chance". This is a doubly odd assertion, as on the one hand its stating the obvious. Anything that happens is surely, by that very fact, possible. Anything truly impossible doesn't happen. If an elephant were to jump out of a match box and recite Chaucer it would have to be deemed possible. It would not make it less extraordinary.

So the emphasis must be on statistics and chance..that is some suggestion the incident is likely to happen by sheer weight of numbers ...but this is, I would say, just as clearly untrue. Because what exactly are the statistics by which to analyze the likelihood of an object disappearing or reappearing in plain sight? How do you measure the probability of such a thing? It's possible,because it happens. But it is not predictible, inevitable, or - so far - in any obvious way explicable: least of all by chance.

||And yet, in all these stories an author there appears to be. By which I mean an intent, or a trigger of some kind.||

||Alternatively I also play with the idea that "Synchronicity", the drawing together of meaningfully themed experiences, is a genuine physical quality of the universe and that - if the dead do live on - they can perhaps stir the sea of coincidence around us; that is, not setting up the individual incident but causing general un-predetermined stuff suggestive of their presence to happen around us.||

I think this is it. Time works different in higher dimensions, and I think the amount of future they can see is much greater. They can play with the probability field and "welcome" certain possibilities.

One observation I have about 5D selfhood is that, instead of perceiving options (3D) or clusters of options/scenarios (4D), one perceives different selves to "be." So one way to play with the probability field is to ask, "Who am I such that XYZ are accomplished?"

||The idea that waking reality is a dream..quite literally. Dreams are malleable. And that imagining it to be so all paranormal experiences can be explained.||

Right, well, I would adjust to say different levels of malleability. 3D is pretty stiff and stable, whereas 4D/the Astral is extremely fluid and unstable (think dreams). 5D returns us to stability, though is more malleable than 3D. I would say that the difference, based on my studies and direct experiences, is that stuff in 4D will simply dissolve unless continuously willed, whereas stuff in 5D will "stick" until willed otherwise. Thus, talk of Ascension focuses almost exclusively on 5D, with talk of going to 4D seemingly are rare mistake. 6D also seems to be unstable again, and again the next stable stage appears to be 7D. One might speculate that prime dimensions are the stable ones, yet I see talk of 9D, so perhaps it is only the odd dimensions. There is a remarkable consistency in this "myth."

I talking frequently with a FB friend who comments here sometimes. He is coming from an atheist background and wants to believe in psi and the Afterlife but says it seems "too good to be true." He has experienced some things he can't explain, however, including a fairly evidential mediumship reading from me. Still, it's hard to believe.

OTOH, Michael has read a ton of cases and believes in the Afterlife. I experience psi on an almost daily basis. Heck, I got a reading at the local Pagan Pride festival last week. I had neutral expectations, but the guy just jumps in and starts talking about the major themes of my life with high accuracy. There is no question in my mind that psi is real. The matter of the Afterlife is more complicated since we are not in control, and it is not a matter merely of ascertaining whether a phenomenon exists but rather a matter of putting together a world that comes from a wide variety of evidence and that is difficult to experience directly.

So we have this spectrum of "belief" in society, from those who just "know" that all of this is obviously "woo" and untrue, to those of us who have experienced things directly and have no choice but to believe to some extent or other.

I think there's a point at which that we, who have experienced and/or researched matters to our satisfaction, simply have to wait for the others to catch up. Instead of begging Skeptics to believe, we feel the urge to trudge ahead and try to put together the big picture.

Besides it is not enough to show the evidence, but we must develop the best reasons to interpret this as examples of an afterlife, a point we have not progressed much since the beginning of the Society for Psychical Research.

\\"I'm not sure who would argue that synchronicities have any value to "Science" (the method or the imagined body) at all." - Lawrence//
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Albert Einstein said "There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle."

I prefer to live my life as if everything is a miracle. I liked your statement about synchronicities being personally meaningful. That is what is important. I have found it to be very difficult to share some of the synchronicities I've experienced because to me they were mind boggling - and I guess to other people they were either boring or trivial.

I'm with you on that. The super-psi hypothesis implies if not directly states that all these ADCs are flat-out lies. *Consistent* lies. Meaning that there must be a single entity lying, a single system lying, or multiple entities joining in the same lie. And why would that be? There is no explanation for that.

"Communication through mediums is "interpreted" as relating to an afterlife as it involves the deceased apparently passing on the message "there is an afterlife."

NDEs are "interpreted" as relating to an afterlife as they involve people seemingly physically dead returning to conscious life and saying "While I was dead I went to an afterlife"

Apparitions are "interpreted" as relating to an afterlife as they involve the appearance as living of people known to be dead."

That shows great naivety, ie, is not enough that a medium say that their messages come from a spirit of a deceased person to accept that their messages come from a spirit of a deceased person. On NDEs, we must check the condition of the patient during her / his experience and if there is veridical and extrasensorial information. On the apparitions, we must check whether the apparitions show intelligent behavior or they are like photograms... I mean, there are many possibilities that have to be examined. The duck analogy is flawed because we can examine a duck much more freely than examining a spirit of the deceased.

My point was Juan says its not enough to show the evidence but we need to find persuasive reasons for saying the evidence *even when shown* for mediumship, nde's, apparitions etc should be interpreted as representing an afterlife. I'm saying their very subject matter is the reason for so interpreting it, as that's precisely what they purport to be evidence of.

IF you accept the evidence for these anomalous experience and events is solid and convincing - that they really do happen as described (and of course many don't and never will accept that, but the point is IF you DO) then why would you require any further barriers to saying it is what it appears to be? You may be completely wrong for reasons you do not yet know, but in those "there is sufficient evidence this is real" circumstances, survival as the explanation is surely a stating the obvious position which doesn't require additional justification.

I think it's pretty common that stress (and grief) cause memory loss. What this reminded me of, though, are the NDEs in which the person has some sort of violent accident, but very clearly remembers the NDE, and states that it was "more real" than real life. I may be wrong, but don't people usually have very fuzzy memories of very stressful accidents? And yet somehow their experience of an NDE was very very clear. When I suffered a head injury, became unconscious, and experienced what I'm pretty sure was a very brief NDE, what impressed me for days and days afterward was how distinct and clear the NDE experience was (not hurting my head, the memory of which was very fuzzy), and how I could recall it so easily.

I recall reading a few NDEs that involved car and/or motorcycle accidents, involving head injury, and the person explaining how "real" and clear the NDE was. It seems that those experiences involving a head injury, in which the brain is kind of crashing against the skull, would hardly result in some hyper-realistic, very easy to recall experience.

"IF you accept the evidence for these anomalous experience and events is solid and convincing - that they really do happen as described (and of course many don't and never will accept that, but the point is IF you DO) then why would you require any further barriers to saying it is what it appears to be? You may be completely wrong for reasons you do not yet know, but in those "there is sufficient evidence this is real" circumstances, survival as the explanation is surely a stating the obvious position which doesn't require additional justification."

But to accept that what is described is what happened, reasons are required as I wrote in the other comment. Science is not only made of evidence.

"hi Juan, how does independent voice mediumship require us to interpret the medium?"

By affirming that the spirit of a deceased is the one who generates the independent voice of the medium, we are interpreting this phenomenon. All phenomenon is interpreted.

This passive thermal imaging campaign is fully endorsed by the NSU, Arthur Findlay College, and the Banyan Retreat, among others.

I really don't see how any genuine physical medium could argue against this.

Passive IR, by its very nature, does not emit light - it only records the thermal energy from the surrounding environment. There's no light being emitted to 'damage ectoplasm' or any of the other excuses we are used to hearing.

I'm glad the mediumship community is at last taking steps to self-regulate. God knows, after the Garry Mannion affair, we really need it to.

I know I was in a minor road accident a few years back and I have no memory of the accident actually happening. I remember stepping into the road, and I remember finding myself atop a stranger's fallen moped, and I remember that even the same day I couldn't remember the fall actually happening. I THINK what happened is the moped was moving fairly slowly and my handbag got caught on it, going by the positioning, but I can't remember it happening, and that wasn't even particularly traumatic. Nasty shock, but all I got was bruising on my leg and no head damage at all. I can only imagine how much it'd screw up your memory to have a really serious incident.

Maybe your thinking problem was as a result of allergies. Something similar happen to me during heavy allergy periods, the allergies also contribute to bad sleeping which helps nothing.

I find that as I get older my willingness to concentrate on light fiction has decreased drastically. I don't think I could read a lot of the books I read when I was younger because they just don't seem to me to be worth thinking about. Try reading Marilynne Robinson's Lila and see if you can concentrate on that. I could read that but I don't think I could get through a who-done-it.

My radio has trouble picking up stations from Boston every June, for reasons I couldn't begin to explain. The problem is usually cleared up by late summer. Not that I want to listen to them, much, these days.

Ok was in two minds about posting this, although I have always posted my experiences.

I was reading this morning on my facebook a posting of a girl who is clairvoyant, sentient, has precognance, and is an empath, so feels everyone's feelings.

And said "This is just how I am, and I'm putting it out there".

I haven't had anything visual for some years, usually talk in my head. So here goes, people can surmise, who knows?

I have been waking up regularly at night, which is annoying, a bit on my mind, so chatting to the powers that be a bit lately.

So it must have been about 2.30 am in the morning, and I wake up annoyed I'm awake as I have been. When suddenly a warm yellow light, lights the room, it seems to hover just below the ceiling as I can see its square shape fitting the corner of the room. Now I'm thinking its not lightening as that's more light, and flickers quickly, and this settled for a bit. Not the lights coming on, or a light shone in the room as I have venetians so they show the slat pattern on the wall if light shines in.

So I'm puzzled and go back to sleep. I woke again at 4.30 am, as I looked at my phone, and of course my thoughts go back to the light trying to work out what it is. So I think I'll ask the powers that be, was it you, and if so, I guess you could do it again to show me it was you?

So I wait probably 10 minutes, thinking "that's not going to happen". And back comes the light, exactly the same. Cool. I'm stumped. Lyn x.